finding last match in a file

David Mertz, Ph.D. mertz at gnosis.cx
Thu Sep 19 17:10:44 EDT 2002


|..find the last line which matches a certain experssion.  ...Is there
|some way to read through the file backwards and simply find first match
|starting from the end of the file.

I provide one solution in my _Text Processing in Python_ book
(forthcoming as dead trees, available now as ASCII).  The book itself is
at:

    http://gnosis.cx/TPiP/

In chapter 2, I have a section titled:

    PROBLEM: Reading a file backwards by record, line, or paragraph

I'm sure improvements are possible (it's meant to point to the approach,
not necessarily be the final code).  But what I do should be pretty
efficient (as I mention, for 2.2+, I'd rather use 'yield').

Yours, David...

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